Cover of Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, used as the shared image for this summary series.
In 1994, Henry Kissinger published the book Diplomacy. He was a renowned scholar and diplomat who served as the United States National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. His book provides an extensive sweep of the history of foreign affairs and the art of diplomacy, with a particular focus on the 20th century and the Western World. Kissinger, known for his alignment with the realist school of international relations, inquires into the concepts of the balance of power, raison d'État, and Realpolitik across different eras.
His work has been widely praised for its scope and intricate detail. Yet, it has also faced criticism for its focus on individuals over structural forces, and for presenting a reductive view of history. Also, critics have also pointed out that the book focuses excessively on Kissinger's individual role in events, potentially overstating his impact. In any case, his ideas are worthy of consideration.
This article presents a summary of Kissinger's ideas in the eighteenth chapter of his book, called "The Success and the Pain of Containment".
You can find all available summaries of this book, or you can read the summary from the previous chapter of the book, by clicking these links.
The Search for a Postwar Framework
In late 1945, American policymakers were uncertain how to interpret Stalin’s conduct. The wartime partnership had not produced the cooperative order Roosevelt had expected, and the Potsdam arrangements and later foreign ministers’ conferences had failed to settle the basic political issues of Europe. In Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, Soviet power was being imposed without regard for American expectations about democratic self-determination. In Germany and Italy, Moscow no longer appeared to be acting as a partner in postwar reconstruction. Washington therefore faced a problem larger than any single dispute: it had to decide whether Soviet behavior was a temporary misunderstanding, a normal expression of Russian security policy, or the beginning of an irreconcilable conflict.
Truman’s first answer came in 1946, when he successfully pressed for the Soviet withdrawal from Azerbaijan. Yet even this firmness remained within a Wilsonian frame. Like Roosevelt, Truman resisted describing American policy as a balance-of-power response to a rival great power and preferred to invoke general principles, the United Nations Charter, and the defense of political freedom. Kissinger stresses that this was not hypocrisy. American leaders genuinely disliked the language of spheres of influence, even as spheres of influence were taking shape. The Western occupation zones in Germany were consolidated under American leadership, while the Soviet Union turned Eastern Europe into a dependent bloc held together less by consent than by coercion.
The Kremlin also tried to disrupt Western consolidation. It encouraged communist pressure in France and Italy and supported instability around Greece, where a guerrilla war threatened to draw the eastern Mediterranean into Soviet-influenced politics. American leaders understood that they had to resist further expansion. However, their national tradition made it difficult to admit that they were doing what Britain had historically done: blocking a rival power’s movement into strategic regions. The unresolved question was whether Soviet policy reflected correctable suspicion or something rooted in the Soviet system itself.
Kennan, Matthews, and Clifford
The decisive intellectual answer came from George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow. Kennan argued that the sources of Soviet conduct lay inside the Soviet regime and could not be removed by better communication or American reassurance. In his interpretation, Soviet policy joined communist ideology to older Russian habits of insecurity and expansion. Marxist-Leninist doctrine gave the regime a justification for dictatorship, sacrifice, repression, and hostility to capitalism. At the same time, Russian rulers had long feared contact with more advanced Western societies and had sought security through expansion rather than compromise. For Kennan, Soviet hostility was therefore not a passing mood. The United States would have to prepare for a long struggle against a system that interpreted accommodation as weakness and conflict as normal.
The first effort to turn this analysis into policy came in H. Freeman Matthews’s State Department memorandum of April 1, 1946. Matthews treated conflict with Moscow as an endemic feature of Soviet policy and argued that the Soviet Union had to be convinced that its course would lead to disaster. Yet the memorandum also revealed the limits of early American thinking. It noted that the United States had naval and air superiority while the Soviet Union dominated the Eurasian landmass, and it sought to act through the United Nations despite the Soviet veto. Matthews listed vulnerable regions from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe to Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Sinkiang, and Manchuria, but most lay beyond practical American reach. The paper also appealed to Britain to remain the principal balancing power in Western Europe, although Britain’s exhaustion made that hope unrealistic.
Clark Clifford’s September 1946 study removed much of this ambiguity. Clifford accepted that Soviet power had to be counterbalanced by American power, and he expanded the mission into a global commitment to democratic countries threatened by the Soviet Union. The scope of that formula remained unclear. It might have meant the defense of Western Europe, or it might have meant a much broader obligation to defend endangered societies in the Middle East, Asia, and beyond. In practice, the wider interpretation gained influence. Clifford also cast the conflict in moral rather than diplomatic terms. The problem lay in the character of the Soviet leadership more than in a negotiable clash of interests. Therefore, policy aimed to restore equilibrium and to change Soviet conduct, perhaps by waiting for new leaders who would accept a settlement once they recognized American strength.
Kissinger emphasizes a major consequence of this formulation: American statesmen did not define concrete terms for ending the Cold War. If the Soviet Union remained ideologically hostile, negotiations appeared pointless. If it changed internally, a settlement would follow naturally. In both cases, spelling out possible compromises seemed unnecessary or even restrictive. As in wartime planning for the postwar world, the United States preserved freedom of action by avoiding precise diplomatic objectives.
The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan
The first great test of the emerging doctrine came in Greece and Turkey. Britain had been supporting both countries against Soviet pressure and communist subversion, but in the winter of 1946–47 the Attlee government told Washington that it could no longer carry the burden. Truman was ready to assume Britain’s historic role of blocking Russian access to the Mediterranean, yet he needed a language more American than British geopolitics. On February 27, 1947, Marshall offered congressional leaders a restrained strategic case, but Dean Acheson turned the issue into a confrontation between two great powers and a defense of freedom itself.
Truman adopted that moral language when he announced what became the Truman Doctrine on March 12, 1947. Rather than present aid to Greece and Turkey as a limited strategic measure, he contrasted two political orders. In one, majorities governed through free institutions that protected civil liberties; in the other, a minority kept power by terrorizing opponents, controlling the press, manipulating elections, and repressing dissent. The United States, he declared, would support free peoples resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures. Kissinger treats this as a watershed. Once Washington defined the conflict in moral terms, Stalin’s preferred language of reciprocal concessions became far harder to use. The confrontation would end only through a change in Soviet purposes, the collapse of the Soviet system, or both.
The doctrine also created a lasting ambiguity. If the United States was defending democracy, critics could ask why it supported societies that were strategically important but politically imperfect. If it was defending national security, critics could ask why it seemed to promise help to any threatened free people, whether or not the area was vital to American interests. This tension became a permanent feature of American foreign policy. It divided critics who thought the United States too amoral from those who thought it too moralistic and crusading.
The Marshall Plan extended the same logic from military and political resistance to social and economic reconstruction. In June 1947, Marshall proposed American assistance for European recovery, arguing that poverty, desperation, and chaos created the conditions for political extremism. The offer was formally open even to governments in the Soviet orbit, a possibility briefly noticed in Warsaw and Prague before Stalin suppressed it. The program was presented as an attack on hunger and disorder, which also meant resistance to communist parties and front organizations that profited from misery. In Kissinger’s reading, the plan reflected the American belief, sharpened by the New Deal, that political stability depended on narrowing the gap between expectations and economic reality.
Kennan’s “X” Article and the Logic of Containment
In July 1947, Kennan’s anonymous “X” article in Foreign Affairs, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” gave the emerging policy its canonical statement and its name. The article repeated the central argument of the “Long Telegram” in a more philosophical form. Soviet hostility to the West, Kennan argued, was inseparable from the domestic structure of the Soviet regime. The Communist Party was the only organized force in society, and the regime needed an external enemy to justify internal discipline. Soviet policy would probe for influence wherever it could. It would also retreat before firm barriers because it was patient enough to avoid immediate victory.
The answer was a policy of firm containment at every point where the Soviet Union threatened the interests of a peaceful and stable world. Kennan’s most striking forecast was that the Soviet system contained the seeds of its own transformation. Because the Soviet regime had never learned legitimate succession, a future struggle for power might force leaders to appeal to a politically immature population, disrupting the party’s discipline and exposing the fragility of the system. Kissinger notes that this prediction came remarkably close to what occurred after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Yet Kissinger also stresses the burden Kennan placed on American policy. Containment required the United States to resist Soviet pressure around a vast periphery that stretched through Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The Kremlin retained the initiative to choose the point of crisis. The policy defended the status quo in many separate places while promising that a series of inconclusive contests would eventually produce the collapse of communism. This was a heroic but reactive doctrine. It assumed that history would work in America’s favor if the United States showed enough endurance.
Containment therefore wasted the period of America’s greatest relative strength, including the years of its atomic monopoly. Because American leaders believed “positions of strength” still had to be built before diplomacy could succeed, they did not use their temporary superiority to press for a concrete settlement in Europe. The Cold War consequently became more militarized, and the West developed a sense of weakness that Kissinger considers inaccurate. At the same time, the doctrine’s ambiguity generated action in other fields. From the New Deal came the Marshall Plan’s economic logic. From the Second World War came the conviction that aggression had to be deterred by overwhelming power, which led to the Atlantic Alliance.
NATO, Germany, and the American Language of Alliance
NATO was the first peacetime military alliance in American history. Its immediate spur was the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Stalin had already tightened control over Eastern Europe after the Marshall Plan, purging communist leaders suspected of national independence. In Czechoslovakia, even a strong communist position within an elected government was insufficient. The government was overthrown, Jan Masaryk died after falling from his office window, and a communist dictatorship was installed in Prague. As in 1939, Prague became a symbol around which resistance to totalitarian power could be organized.
The Pact of Brussels, formed by Western European states in April 1948, could not by itself deter Soviet attack or communist coups backed by Soviet power. NATO was therefore created to tie the United States and Canada to the defense of Western Europe under an international military command. The strategic result was clear: two military alliances and two spheres of influence faced one another across Central Europe. Yet American leaders refused to describe NATO in those terms. The Truman administration insisted that the Atlantic Alliance was not a traditional coalition to preserve the balance of power. It was said to defend principle rather than territory, to oppose aggression rather than any particular state, and to strengthen a “balance of principle” rather than a balance of power.
Kissinger regards this as historically unconvincing but politically revealing. Traditional alliances rarely named their adversaries; they defined the conditions that would activate their obligations, just as NATO did. Since the Soviet Union was the only plausible aggressor in Europe, it did not need to be named. Nevertheless, the American need to distinguish NATO from old diplomacy was intense. Dean Acheson understood the requirements of equilibrium, but he also understood that Americans would accept them only when embedded in a larger moral ideal. Thus the European balance of power was reconstructed in the language of collective security.
The creation of the Federal Republic of Germany was equally important. By merging the American, British, and French zones, the Western powers accepted the division of Germany for the indefinite future. This undid Bismarck’s unified Germany. It also created a permanent challenge to Soviet control in Central Europe because West Germany would not accept the legitimacy of the Soviet-sponsored East German state. For two decades, the Federal Republic refused to recognize the German Democratic Republic and threatened to break relations with countries that did so. Even after abandoning that Hallstein Doctrine after 1970, it did not surrender its claim to represent the German nation as a whole.
By 1949, the postwar order resembled the pre-1914 alliance system in its rigidity, but Kissinger emphasizes two differences. First, each bloc was dominated by a superpower strong enough to restrain its allies. Second, nuclear weapons destroyed the illusion that war could be quick or painless. American leadership also gave the Western alliance a moral and sometimes messianic vocabulary. Later critics would call that rhetoric cynical, but Kissinger insists that the architects of containment were sincere. Even classified documents were suffused with moral claims, showing that American strategy depended on values as well as interests.
NSC-68 and the Moralization of Strategy
NSC-68, produced in April 1950, became the official statement of American Cold War strategy. It defined the national interest in moral terms, arguing that a defeat of free institutions anywhere was a defeat everywhere. The loss of Czechoslovakia mattered less for its material capabilities than for what it signified in the contest of values. The document urged the United States to make itself strong through military power, economic power, and the affirmation of its own principles at home and abroad.
The goal remained a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system. NSC-68 rejected both a war of conquest and a general settlement based on spheres of influence. Nuclear victory would fail to produce the desired moral and political transformation. A negotiated division of the world would leave the Kremlin able to exploit its sphere. In Kissinger’s interpretation, this made American objectives extraordinarily demanding. The United States renounced conquest and coercive settlement while seeking an outcome as sweeping as the conversion of its adversary. It possessed unprecedented strength, yet its doctrine taught it to think in terms of relative weakness and long-term mobilization.
This framework also lacked criteria for measuring partial success. If the purpose of the Cold War was the internal transformation of the Soviet Union, each crisis along the way could look inconclusive. American leaders in the early 1950s had not yet imagined that wars and domestic unrest would divide the country before the eventual collapse of communism confirmed part of the original forecast.
Critics of Containment
Kissinger organizes the early criticism of containment into three main schools. Walter Lippmann represented the realist critique. He rejected Kennan’s confidence that Soviet society would decay and argued that containment had no margin for error. By allowing the Soviet Union to choose the places of confrontation, the policy would draw America into remote and ambiguous regions along the Soviet periphery. Without clear criteria for vital interests, Washington would assemble clients and dependents that could exploit American commitments, leaving the United States to choose between humiliation and costly support for weak regimes.
Lippmann’s remedy was a different diplomacy rather than retreat. He wanted American policy guided case by case by American interests, with the central aim of restoring the balance of power in Europe. In his view, containment risked accepting Europe’s indefinite division. The real objective should be the withdrawal of Soviet power from the center of the continent. Kissinger judges Lippmann prophetic about the frustrations of a reactive policy, while Kennan was more accurate about communism’s inner weakness. Kennan understood how to mobilize American endurance; Lippmann understood the strain of endless peripheral stalemate.
Churchill offered a second critique. He accepted the danger of Soviet expansion and saw containment as a means rather than an end in itself. From the Second World War onward, he had tried to limit Soviet gains in order to improve the democracies’ bargaining position. After the war, especially in speeches in 1948 and 1950, he warned that the West’s position would be strongest while the United States still possessed atomic superiority. He favored negotiations from strength, perhaps even a diplomatic ultimatum. American leaders recoiled from using the atomic monopoly as a threat and disliked any settlement that accepted a reduced Soviet sphere. Churchill wanted to shrink Soviet influence and coexist with what remained; Truman’s America preferred to wait for the collapse or conversion of Soviet power.
The difference reflected national experience. Britain was accustomed to compromise and imperfect settlements; the United States preferred final solutions achieved by mobilizing vast resources. Churchill could combine military buildup with active diplomacy. American leaders tended to treat strength and diplomacy as successive stages: first create strength, then negotiate. The American view prevailed because the United States was stronger and because Churchill, then in opposition, could not impose his strategy.
Henry Wallace led the third and most persistent critique, rooted in American radical and populist traditions. Wallace rejected the premise that Soviet expansion required containment, unlike Lippmann and Churchill. He distrusted Britain, accused the United States of adopting Machiavellian methods, and argued that America had no moral right to intervene abroad until it had corrected its own social failings. He interpreted Soviet conduct largely as fear of capitalist encirclement and accepted a Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe as the counterpart to an American sphere elsewhere. In a striking reversal, the critic who denounced American power politics accepted spheres of influence, while the administration accused of cynicism rejected the Soviet sphere on moral grounds.
Wallace also insisted that American action required United Nations approval, despite the Soviet veto, and he opposed unilateral economic programs such as the Marshall Plan. His movement collapsed after the coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade, and the invasion of South Korea; in the 1948 presidential election he finished far behind Truman. Nevertheless, Kissinger argues that Wallace’s themes endured: moral equivalence between America and its communist adversaries, suspicion of America’s allies, reliance on world opinion over geopolitics, and the claim that American imperfections invalidated foreign commitments. These ideas would return with force during Vietnam.
Containment was also challenged from the right by conservatives such as John Foster Dulles, who accepted its premises but found it too passive. If communism would ultimately decay, they argued, liberation would hasten the process and reduce the cost. By the end of Truman’s presidency, containment was attacked as too aggressive by radicals and too passive by conservatives. The controversy intensified as crises moved to peripheral regions, where causes were morally mixed and direct threats to American security were harder to show. Korea and Vietnam kept alive the argument that containment might require sacrifices for ambiguous purposes.
Success, Ambiguity, and the American Conscience
Containment was hardheaded in its analysis of Soviet motives and idealistic in its expectation that patient resistance could bring down a totalitarian adversary without conquest. It was also abstract in its prescriptions. It assigned the United States a global defensive mission but left diplomacy with little role until the Soviet system changed. Formulated at the height of American power, it taught Americans to think of themselves as still building the strength needed for settlement. It preserved freedom and organized resistance, but it also prolonged a diplomacy of waiting.
The deepest cost was internal. In 1957, even Kennan had begun to reinterpret the Soviet challenge as a summons to correct America’s own racial, urban, educational, and social failings. Kissinger argues that this reflected the moral perfectionism built into the doctrine. A country that makes its foreign policy depend on its own moral purity can achieve neither perfection nor security. Yet this self-criticism became possible partly because containment had already manned the free world’s defenses. The United States could question itself so intensely because its alliances, recovery programs, and military positions had become strong.
Containment ultimately carried the United States through more than four decades of construction, conflict, and victory. In Kissinger’s view, the peoples America set out to defend were, on the whole, successfully protected. The greater victim was the American conscience, strained by the gap between universal moral claims and the compromises, costs, and ambiguous wars required to sustain them. America emerged from the struggle battered by controversy and self-doubt, but it had achieved almost everything the doctrine set out to accomplish.
You can read the summary of the next chapter of the book by clicking this link.